The Change of Protestant Stance on Abortion I. | George Grant
rom the book: Third Time Around by George Grant
Chapter 6:
LIFE AND LIBERTY:
THE AMERICAN EXPERIENCE
, alea iacta est 1
The accursed everyday life of the modernist is instinct with the four sins crying to heaven for vengeance, and there is no humanity in it, and no simplicity, and no recollection.
Hilaire Belloc
The Modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone. Thus some scientists care for truth; but their truth is pitiless. And thus some humanitarians care only for pity; but their pity-I am sorry to say-is often untruthful.
G. K. Chesterton
How the West Was Won
Like an avowed atheist who sees the devil at night, America awoke in a jolt to the horror of abortion. Suddenly-like the flash of Lavoisier’s mirror or the sweep of Foucault’s pendulum-concern over the scandal of child-killing be- came something more than grist for journalism’s mill. It became a moral crusade. It became a movement; an outcry against the insidious exploitation of women and children swept the nation. At first, the press was disinclined to expose the homicidal details of the abortion industry due to the possibility of their own loss of income-abortionists accounted for as much as a quarter of all classified advertising dollars for a number of local newspapers. But a number of courageous journalists, following St. Clair’s lead in the Times, began to expose the awful practices of heretofore respectable and upstanding physicians, who traded on the misfortunes of others. Before long, the dam of self-interest broke and a flood of articles began to appear in several other New York papers-the Tribune, the Herald, and the Police Gazette. Soon, all around the country, the same newspapers, magazines, and digests that had previously accepted advertising from abortionists began to throw the searchlight of truth on their detestable deeds of darkness-in New Orleans, in San Francisco, in Philadelphia, in Boston, in Washington, in Cleveland, and in innumerable other cities. Sensational headlines began to appear in profusion: „The Crime Against Nature,” „A Damnable Deed,” „The Curse of American Society,” „The Terrible Sins Which Vanity and Fashion Lead Their Devotees to Commit,” „A Long Record of Infamy,” „Child Murder in Massachusetts,” and „The Demon Doctor.”
Though the medical community was still fragmented, disorganized, and disconnected, virtually every professional medical association began to decry any and all forms of child-killing. The fledgling American Medical Association, for instance, circulated a gynecological report emphasizing the necessity of protecting „the safety of the child” at all times, and denouncing „the perverted views of morality” underlying abortion. It resolved to expel from its ranks all abortionists-who were but „modern Herods,” „educated assassins,” and „monsters of iniquity,” who presented „a hideous view of moral deformity as the evil spirit could present.”The organization’s professional periodical, the Journal of the American Medical Association, published a scathing critique of abortion’s death ethic noting that from the moment of conception:
The unborn child is human, and at all periods differs in degree and not in kind from the infant and the adult. Therefore, we must regard it as a human being with an inalienable right to life, and that its destruction is homicide.
Even reticent politicians and barristers began to take notice and to take action. Tougher restrictive legislation, more efficient local enforcement, and strict sentencing guidelines were put into place all around the country, and the prosperous physician-killers were driven to desperate resources. Eventually every state in the Union passed laws making their morbid arts illegal. Many went so far as to affirm that the abortion of „any woman pregnant with child is an assault with intent to murder. „With penalties rang- ing from seven years of hard labor in the penitentiary to life in prison, the crime was dearly and legally vilified. But as impressive as all these efforts were-in the press, in the medical community, and in the political arena – it was the church that led the pro-life movement toward a consummate victory.
Actually, the nineteenth century American church seemed uniquely impotent to lead such an important struggle. The Catholic community was still largely comprised of immigrants and was thus excluded from the mainstream of American discourse. And the divisive moral and political dilemma of chattel slavery dominated the thinking of most Protestants – to the exclusion of almost everything else – in both the North and the South. But for many, the ironic similarities between the abortion issue and the slavery issue could not be ignored. And so, a number of courageous pioneers shook the church out of its doldrums. Once again, they were able to place the issue of abortion squarely be- fore the people. The Catholic bishops of Baltimore, Boston, and New York issued strong statements reiterating the church’s his- toric commitment to protect innocent human life around mid-century. Then, when Pope Pius IX renewed the medieval censures against abortion in 1869, each local parish was encouraged in an encyclical to become involved in pro-life activity:
To serve the least of our brethren is the substance and the essence of our earthly duties, thus portraying in the plainest fashion the gospel of grace; therefore, let all at- tend to the protection of the unwanted child as much as the sickly neighbor. For such as this shall we all be called unto account.
Methodist and Baptist churches, shortly after the War Between the States, began widely circulating several pro-life sermon booklets, including Indiana minister E. Frank Howe’s classic A Sermon on Ante-Natal Infanticide. The booklets showed that the Bible teaches that life begins at conception-in luore than forty different passages from Genesis to Revelation-and that abortion is thus „no less than murder.”
In 1868, a conference of the Congregationalist churches issued a stinging denunciation of abortion and its shockingly wide prevalence. It urged faithful believers to stand firm in their Scriptural convictions in the strongest possible terms:
Let imagination draw the darkest picture that reason or taste could allow, and it would fail to set forth adequately the outlines and shocking details of this practice. Our investigation has brought us to the belief that after all the proper deductions, full one third of the natural pop-ulation of our land, fails by the h.and of violence; that in no one year of the late war have so many lost life in camp or battle, as have failed of life by reason of this horrid home crime. We shudder to view the horrors of intemperance, of slavery, and of war; but those who best know the facts and bearing of this crime, declare it to be a greater evil, more demoralizing and destructive, than either intemperance, slavery, or war itself.
The report went on to prophetically condemn the lascivious and concupiscent lifestyles that drove young men and women to such extremes:
Fashion, inexorable, tyrannical, with its whirl of amusements and frivolous enjoyments, has come to demand of religion not only, but of nature herself, that they bend to her despotism, and sacrifice on her bloody altar. A low love of pleasure and ease, vitiated tastes, perverted views of life, and ruined moral sentiments have so wrought themselves into our civilization as a low and vicious leaven, that we have come to consent to customs and habits that will destroy us as a people inevitably, unless arrested betimes.
In a similar fashion, the Presbyterian churches adopted a stridently pro-life position at their general assembly in 1869:
This assembly regards the destruction by parents of their own offspring, before birth, with abhorrence, as a crime against God and against nature; and as the frequency of such murders can no longer be concealed, we hereby warn those that are guilty of this crime that, except they repent, they cannot inherit eternal life. We also exhort those that have been called to preach the gospel, and all who love purity and truth, and who would avert the just judgments of Almighty God from the nation, that they be no longer silent, or tolerant of these things, but that they endeavor by all proper means to stay the floods of impurity and cruelty.
Besides the fiery evangelist D. L. Moody, perhaps the most popular preacher in America immediately following the war was the Congregationalist John Todd. In 1867, he added his voice to the groundswell of pro-life sentiment in an article entitled „Fashionable Murder.” In an interview sometime later, he reiterated the importance of the issue:
Murder is, of course, heinous of its own accord. But the murder of a mother’s own flesh within the womb is a crime against heaven that is the very essence of sin and inimicable with the Christian religion. Left alone, such a crime would sunder the whole fabric of our families, of our communities, of our churches, of our markets and industries, and finally of our nation. We have rid our- selves of the blight of Negro slavery, affirming that no man may be considered less than any other man. Now let us apply that holy reason to the present scandal.
Summarizing the overall response of the Christian community to the abortion issue, Arthur Cleveland Cox, the renowned Episcopal bishop of the diocese of New York, said that:
Though physicians and journalists have laid much of the groundwork for the exposure of this awful crime against God and man, it was the Christian churches, all of the churches across the broad spectrum of denomination and sect, that have brought hope and help to the innocents. For a glittering moment, I have seen Christ’s Body as one.
So monolithic was the consensus that the church forged, that even the most ardent feminists had to rally under the pro-life banner. Susan B. Anthony, for instance, declared:
I deplore the horrible crime of child murder. We must reach the root of the evil. It is practiced by those whose inmost souls revolt from dreadful need. No matter what the motive, love of ease, or a desire to save from suffering the unborn innocent, the woman is awfully guilty who commits the deed; but oh, thrice guilty is he who drove her to the desperation which impelled her to the crime.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton agreed:
When we consider that women are often treated as property, it is degrading to women all the more that we should treat our children as property to be disposed of as we see fit.
As did Matilda Gage:
This subject lies deeper down into woman’s wrongs than any other. But, the crime of abortion is not one in which the guilt lies soley [sic] with the woman. Indeed, I hesitate not to assert that most of this crime of child murder, abortion, or infanticide, lies at the door of all men.
In less than two decades, the church was able to marshall hostile journalists, ambivalent physicians, reticent politicians, and even radical feminists to the cause of exploited mothers and their helpless unborn. They succeeded over whelmingly. And they restored the foundations of a glorious legacy of freedom and justice that had always been at the heart of the remarkable American experiment.
Resource
from George Grant Third Time Around c. könyvéből : https://www.garynorth.com/freebooks/docs/210e_47e.htm
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